Skidmore part of national collaborative prisons project/exhibit

Skidmore students have partnered with a New School-led coalition of 500 college and university students and formerly incarcerated individuals from 20 cities to launch States of Incarceration. This is the first national traveling multimedia exhibition and coordinated public dialogue to explore the history and future of mass incarceration in the United States. States of Incarceration is a project of Humanities Action Lab, (Project HAL) a collaboration led by the New School, working with issue-based organizations and public spaces to foster new public dialogue on contested social issues, through public humanities projects that explore the diverse local histories and current realities of shared global concerns.

The exhibition and project, the culmination of two years of planning and discussion between the communities, is a national public reckoning with one of the most pressing issues facing our country. Using many tools of truth and reconciliation processes, the 20 communities explored the deep historical roots of incarceration, shared personal stories related to the issue, and strategized ways of enacting policy change.

The exhibit launches April 14–16 at The New School in NYC before traveling to the 19 other communities that created it. In each community, the exhibition and project will focus on an issue of incarceration that is unique to that community; the New School exhibition, a collaboration between university students and the Fortune Society, will focus on Rikers Island (Please click here for the livesteam link to the April 14-16 conference). In September and October 2017, the exhibition will travel to Saratoga Springs for display at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.

Skidmore's contribution to the project comes from students of Eric Morser, associate professor of history, who last fall taught HI 363 "Adventures in Public History: The Prison Project." He says the course was designed to "focus more attention on public history and help our students think about how to apply what they learn in the classroom to the world beyond Skidmore."

"Skidmore is delighted to participate in States of Incarceration," said Beau Breslin, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs. "This initiative is directly related to the latest Skidmore public-history course, 'The Prison Project,' offered last fall. The course provided students with a rare glimpse of life inside a recently closed prison and strengthened our growing emphasis civic engagement by fostering meaningful connections with the community."
 
He continued, "The opportunity to participate in Project HAL was supported by a number of Skidmore entities and enabled the college, under the leadership of Professor Morser, to engage in a significant project that has strong regional and national implications."

Morser's students focused on nearby Mount McGregor Correctional Facility, which closed last year. They interviewed men who were convicted of a variety of crimes, as well as prison staff and others. They collected images and artifacts, toured the prison, and mapped the layout. They read widely, from Doing Oral History to Orange is the New Black. Morser says using the prison "gave us a great opportunity to talk about how public historians conduct their research, the choices they have to make, and how they present their findings."

"Remembering our past by sharing human-centered stories of oppression and triumph is critical to repairing the harm of mass incarceration, and identifying a clear path to national and local policy change," said Glenn E. Martin, founder and president of JustLeadershipUSA, a national advocacy organization that contributed to the project. "States of Incarceration acknowledges the traumatic generational effects on the communities we've failed. It builds a new public memory and national narrative that's critical for guiding the path to a more restorative future."

An April 14 national launch event will feature a conversation between Martin and Venida Browder, mother of Kalief Browder, whose arrest at 16 for the alleged crime of stealing a backpack and subsequent three-year imprisonment at Rikers Island without trial sparked national debate about solitary confinement and calls to shut down the jail.

The events continue Friday and Saturday, April 15 and 16, with a national summit of the 500-plus participants of States of Incarceration—students, formerly incarcerated individuals, and leading national scholars and advocates—who will tell stories of the roots of incarceration in their respective communities. Stories include how a slave plantation in Louisiana became the infamous Angola prison, how the Dakota Wars left legacies of high rates of Native American incarceration in Minnesota, and how numbers of immigration detention centers have skyrocketed alongside other prisons.

Designed by Brooklyn, N.Y.-based design firm Matter Practice, the States of Incarceration exhibition features interviews with formerly incarcerated people, corrections officers, and policy advocates; images capturing the evolution of crime and punishment in different contexts; and data demonstrating the explosive growth of incarceration and its impact on American society. It will be on view at The New School's Sheila C. Johnson Design Center April 3–24.

States of Incarceration also includes a web platform, statesofincarceration.org; public dialogues; a "Shape the Debate" mobile campaign; and a podcast series. Designed by Picture Projects, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based studio, these elements expand on the travelling exhibition and provide a medium to connect communities across the country.

"We can't fix the criminal justice system in any meaningful or transformative way without properly diagnosing its many problems," said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. "Knowing how we got to this point is critical, to be sure. But so too is changing the culture of punishment by building a shared understanding of the past. I can't think of a more powerful way to achieve these goals than a public history project as remarkable as States of Incarceration."

Universities partnering in States of Incarceration are Arizona State University, Brown University, DePaul University, Duke University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Northeastern University, Parsons Paris, Rutgers University-Newark, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Skidmore College, The New School, University of California at Riverside, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Miami, University of Minnesota, University of New Orleans, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University.

"Divisions over how to move forward may be rooted in divided understanding of how we got here. States of Incarceration brings people together to question how we got here. Tracing our path to mass incarceration can inform solutions." says Liz Sevcenko, Director of the Humanities Action Lab. "Together, we hope these stories will build a national public memory of the incarceration generation, and a public dialogue on what should happen next."